7 Creepy Urban Legends That Happen to Be True (Part 6)

#3. The Corpse in the Deep End

Photos.com

The Legend:

Public pools are gross. We've all heard stories of people finding various things floating in the pool, but hey, not all of us can afford a private oasis in our backyard. So we put up with an occasional Band-Aid or dirty diaper every now and then. It's not like, say, you could go swimming and find your foot being caressed by a cold, dead hand. That's just the kind of shit teenagers spread around to scare the little kids. Right?

Photos.com"And then he said it spread his ass cheeks apart like this ... and then jammed a scorpion into his butthole!"

The Truth:

You bet it could. In Fall River, Massachusetts, some kids had sneaked into a public pool for a late-night swim when they saw something big float to the surface: the very waterlogged corpse of a missing woman. It had been rotting there for almost three days, just below the surface, where toddlers had been unknowingly doing the dog paddle in corpse soup.

The body was a 36-year-old woman named Marie Joseph. She was chaperoning at a crowded pool that not only boasted a 12-foot-deep section, but was also cloudy as all get out. You might recoil at the thought of swimming in cloudy water, but with dozens of kids Marco Polo-ing it up, the pool water was probably as churned as Niagara Falls. So when Joseph went underwater but didn't come back up, the six (six!) lifeguards on duty just missed her, thanks to not being able to see to the bottom of the pool. Or maybe they did see her, but thought she was a great swimmer, since moving water gives the illusion of movement -- even when you're dead.

"Blbllbbbmother bllbblblfuckerblbllb!"

So day one passes. Marie's friends at the pool just assumed that she went home. TWO HEALTH INSPECTORS stop by to check the water; still no clue that there is a woman metaphorically sleeping with the fishes on the concrete bottom. Not until a couple of kids went for a midnight swim and got a lifetime's worth of trauma instead. Oh, hey, speaking of spending time with corpses ...

#2. The Real-Life Weekend at Bernie's

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The Legend:

Aside from being a madcap romp featuring the incorrigible Andrew McCarthy and the insatiably rakish Jonathan Silverman, the "But it turned out he was actually dead the whole time!" stories are pure nightmare fuel. Usually in movies this plays out with somebody talking to an unresponsive person who has his back to them, then they turn the chair around and realize HE WAS DEAD THE WHOLE TIME. Or maybe the "dozing" passenger next to you on the six-hour flight turns out to be a corpse who died upon takeoff, or the still figure you wake up next to in bed doesn't wake up ...

Photos.com"Ew! There is so not going to be a second date."

The Truth:

Robert Young and Mark Rubinson arrived at their friend Jeffrey Jarrett's house to find him dead of an accidental overdose, except according to Young and Rubinson, they thought he was just drunk. Lack of breathing and rigor mortis are common side effects of being drunk, right? Totally. Like anyone else with a dead drunk friend and a dream, Tweedledee and Tweedledum loaded their pal into the car and went out on the town. It seems like the natural thing to do when this is what you face in the mirror every morning:

Jarrett didn't seem much interested in fun, but surely he'd sober up soon, so Young and Rubinson left him to decompose in the back seat while they hit four different bars and strip clubs -- all on Jarrett's tab, of course. All while Jarrett was supposedly sleeping off his liquor in the backseat of the car. Finally, they took him home, kept his credit card and kept on partying. It wasn't until the wee hours of the morning that one of them realized that their buddy might have been dead all along. Like Bruce Willis, but less handsome.

Thankfully, in the end some mob guy took the fall and Young and Rubinson lived happily ever after, even reuniting for a sequel! Oh no, wait. Actually, the Wonder Twins were charged with identity theft, criminal impersonation and abusing a corpse.

Photos.com"Hey, we're not all bad. At least we didn't fuck him ... much."

Haha, that was a fun one, right? Well, that's clearly the end of the article, best to just quit now on that light-hearted story about the two dumbasses. Yep, there are no more disturbing stories out there, none at all. We'll all be happier if we don't keep reading about ...

#1. The Collector

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The Legend:

From Boo Radley to Kimmy Gibbler, we've always worried about the creepy neighbor next door. Every killer since Cain has been described as "quiet," "unsuspecting" and "white." Which is great, because that means you never know who you should be scared to death of.

Photos.comThe only people you can trust are loud, suspicious-looking and brown.

The Truth:

A man living in a nondescript apartment is found to have a large collection of human-sized dolls. That would be fairly off-putting on its own, but the story gets much worse -- beneath the frilly dresses and blonde wigs, police discovered mummified human bodies.

You see, it turned out that bodies had been going missing from local cemeteries around Nizhny Novgorod, a city 250 miles east of Moscow. The trail eventually led to the cramped apartment of local historian Anatoly Moskvin, and what they found was beyond belief.

Via Reuters.comGAH! The stuffed animal head makes it so much worse, somehow.

It turns out that Moskvin was a collector with an obsession so icky, even TLC wouldn't do a show about it. Moskvin collected human corpses, which he dressed in women's clothing and wigs and posed around his apartment. Oh, and their faces were all covered and eerily featureless -- likely as a method of preservation. Or maybe crazy Russian grave robbers just find faceless women hot. Who knows?

Via Reuters.comYou don't need to see this one's face to know it's staring right at you.

The collection wasn't just remarkable for its grossness, but also its scope -- Russian police found a whopping 29 human dolls packed into Moskvin's apartment. So guys, next time your girlfriend or parents start complaining about your collection of vintage action figures or sexy anime girl statues, just remind them that it could be worse. In Russia, the collector collects you.

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